American Horror Story Recap: ‘I Thought Those People Were Supposed to Have Taste’

VF Daily has surveyed the roster of new fall shows, and will be examining several of the more ambitious offerings. Here, Lily Hoagland takes on FX’s American Horror Story.

The instant you see not just twins, but ginger twins, being cruel to a girl with Down syndrome, you know they’re going to be slaughtered. Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck may create wildly different series – Glee, Nip/Tuck – but they assuredly know us as an audience, and what we want to see in our strange hearts of hearts. Those of us who enjoy campy horror tropes want to see those kids bite it, viciously. The haunted house they break into, the center of the series, obliges. Within the first three minutes of the show.

The American Horror Story in question belongs to the Harmons, a family of three that relocates to L.A. over three decades after the above ginger-cide, The move is in an effort to deal with the aftermath of infidelity by husband Ben (Dylan McDermott, the Clive Owen of television) and the miscarriage of wife Vivian (Connie Britton, Mrs. Coach Taylor). Their new house is, of course, good, old-fashioned haunted— but not so much fluttering-curtains haunted as last-half-hour-of-The-Shining haunted. And, in another update from traditional horror stories, instead of having the house’s true nature slowly emerge, it’s thrown out there in the first minute after the family’s arrival. The real-estate agent discloses that the previous tenants, a gay couple, committed murder-suicide in the basement. Sullen teenage daughter Violet (Taissa Farmigia, sister to Vera) is delighted and immediately chirps, “We’ll take it!” Because teenage girls who are only children and who have to join new schools get lonely, see, and with gay murder-suicide ghosts in the basement, you are never alone.

So it was a bit earlier than usual that most viewers started yelling at the screen: Leave, idiots! Why would you ever live there? But Murphy and Falchuck have an easy response: the real-estate agent tells the Harmons their only other option at that price was to live in the Valley. Who wouldn’t put up with ghosts and demonic possessions to avoid that?

Plus, the house comes with the opportunity to live next to Jessica Lange. Her maybe-daughter is the now grown girl from the grisly opening scene who, in case they had any doubts, keeps helpfully popping over to tell the new family that they’re going to die. Jessica Lange—she’s too amazing to be referred to by her character name, thank you, she’s Jessica Freaking Lange—sashays over, pinches some silverwear, refers to her daughter as a mongoloid, and breezily displays other deliciously offensive character traits. The role contains a soupçon of her Big Edie from Grey Gardens, but wicked. Unfortunately for some of her co-stars, her high-voltage presence and severe new look turns everyone else into sort of squishy human sock puppets.

Luckily, too much happens to care about trivialities like acting. In no particular order, the episode contains:

A latex S&M gimp costume that comes to life;

A housekeeper who looks like the mom from Six Feet Under to everyone but Ben, who sees her as a smoking hot babe trying to seduce him;

A man covered in burn scars who reveals he was a previous tenant that burned his family alive because the house told him to;

And then it gets a little weird. Was that really Ben in the gimp costume? Is there a ghost baby inside Connie? Only time can tell, but we’re yet not sure it wants to.

The show balances cutting away from much of the sex and violence while leaving the impression of the explicit. The typical quick flashes of horrifying images and stylistic camera work add to the reeling one feels under the full blast of the bizarre. The show is not for the squeamish or anyone desiring a single coherent storyline; it will delight those adventurous enough to want answers to the “what the hell was that??” that arises every five minutes. If it is able to sustain this glee-ful (contractually obligated, apologies) level of creepiness we’ll follow the further Harmon descent into madness, though the process may require us to take many, many showers to feel clean again.

For VF.com’s recaps of previousAmerican Horror Story episodes read here.